Conventionally, a user's computing experiences were typically focused upon a particular device within a given environment. For instance, the user might interact with a desktop computer in the work environment, to store and access work-related documents, and might also have a home computer for storing and accessing personal documents. Alternatively, the user might employ a portable computer, e.g., a laptop computer, for use in both the work and home environments. In either case, the documents that the user created, edited, or otherwise interacted with, were typically stored on the user's computing device, or accessed via a network to which the computing device was connected.
When the user desired to access a document, the user might employ a user interface element, such as a browser, to view and locate all of the documents stored in the file system associated with the computing device. Alternatively, the user might employ a search tool to locate a document having a particular title, content or other attribute. The file system of the computing device might typically store a variety of documents associated with different types of application programs. For instance, the file system might contain text files associated with a word processing application, spreadsheet files, presentation files, photographs, video files, music files, and the like. Each of these different types of files has an associated format that can be interpreted and displayed by a given application program.
When the user desires to view the documents on the computer, for example via a browser, documents associated with all of the different application programs will generally be displayed. Likewise, when a search is conducted, documents associated with different application programs that meet the search criteria will be presented to the user. For example, a search for documents having the name “sheet” might return a word processing file entitled “Specifications Sheet,” a spreadsheet file entitled “Fiscal Year Spreadsheet” and a graphics file entitled “Color Sheet.” In other words, the storage of documents, and presentation of information to a user about the stored documents, comprehensively encompassed the entire file system associated with the computing device, without regard to the particular application programs with which the documents were affiliated.
More recently, the user's experience has not been limited to a single device for a given environment. Rather, the user might employ a number of different computing devices, such as a laptop or desktop computer, a tablet computer, a smart phone, and the like. At any given time, the user might view, and otherwise interact with, a particular document on any one of these different devices. To enable the user to access and interact with documents via any one of these different devices, the documents are stored both locally on the devices, and on a remote server that functions to synchronize the stored documents on all of the various computing devices. Thus, regardless of which computing device the user employs to access a document, the same version of the document will be present on each device. This type of computing experience is sometimes referred to as “cloud computing.”
When looking for documents that are shared and synchronized among multiple devices, file-system based approaches to accessing documents, e.g., via a browser or search query, may not be conducive to an easy comprehension of the shared documents. In particular, the libraries of documents stored on the remote server for a given user are not viewable through a file-system based browser or search tool. Pursuant thereto, the present disclosure describes a user interface that facilitates easy understanding of which documents that are shared amongst multiple devices, and access to the documents.